The secular archive is often framed as a space in which memory is stabilised through institutional selection, textual preservation, and historiographical order, particularly in contrast to the monastic archive, whose modes of conservation were structured through liturgical continuity, scriptorial discipline, and ecclesiastical authority. This research project, however, approaches the secular archive as a far more porous and acoustically charged field—one constituted not only through documents and official records, but through performances, fragments, rhythms, circulation, and the reverberations of social and cultural life. Whereas the monastic archive sought forms of continuity through repetition, regulation, and devotional preservation, the secular archive emerges through dispersal, mobility, and the instability of transmission. Women’s compositional practices survive within this terrain not as fully secured historical objects, but through partial traces, echoes, lyric fragments, and shifting modes of inscription that exceed the boundaries of formal historiography.
By foregrounding listening as a methodological orientation, the project reconsiders how historical knowledge itself is composed across these different archival formations. The juxtaposition between monastic and secular archives reveals not a simple opposition between sacred and worldly cultures, but distinct economies of memory, voice, and transmission. In the secular sphere, women’s compositional presence frequently appears through discontinuous survivals and relational forms of circulation that resist stable classification. The archive thus becomes a site of deeper intertwined realities, where documentary form and sonic residue remain in tension, and where resonance carries as much historical force as preservation. Attending to these reverberations allows the project to move beyond institutional models of archival authority toward a more relational understanding of cultural memory—one attentive to rhythm, opacity, entanglements, and the unfinished afterlives of women’s artistic production.